High School Courses: Calculating High School GPA for College Admissions
Last Updated on October 24, 2024 by Jill Schwitzgebel
It’s time to talk about something that many families don’t discover or understand until it’s college application time. Sometimes, families don’t even realize it then. But application time is often when you discover that your student’s high school GPA (Grade Point Average) is not necessarily the same GPA that colleges will look at for admission. Nope, most of the time, colleges are not calculating high school GPA in the same way as the high school is. Course selection has a bigger impact than most families realize.
Students hear a lot of advice about the importance of selecting academically rigorous courses in high school. And often, because it makes sense, students will break up a tough academic schedule with an elective or two of interest each semester to lessen the workload. It’s a great idea and I encourage students to do that. And often, those electives provide an almost automatic “A” for good students, which the high school then factors into the GPA. There is not a thing wrong with any of that! It’s a nice boost for that unweighted GPA on the transcript. And, it allows students time to focus on some of those really challenging classes.
BUT, there is more you need to know about electives.
Background
There are a few things to understand before talking about how the colleges will calculate the high school GPA. These are the typical ways that a high school will calculate GPAs:
Unweighted GPA
A student’s unweighted GPA is simply their GPA on a 4.0 scale. If they were to have all As, they would have a perfect 4.0. If they had all Bs, they would have a 3.0. To find your student’s unweighted GPA, you add up the value of their grades, and then divide by the number of courses they took. If the student took five classes one semester and received three A’s, a B, and a C, you would divide 17 grade points by five classes, and come up with a GPA of 3.4 out of a possible 4.0 for the semester.
Weighted GPA
This is where it gets more complicated! High schools frequently add value to Honors and AP or IB classes. Typically, they will weight AP/IB classes a little higher than they will weight the Honors classes. So, in the scenario above, if the B was in an Honors class, perhaps one high school added .5 to the value of that class, meaning that B was actually worth 3.5. And if the C (a 2.0 on an unweighted scale) happened to be in an AP class, perhaps that high school added a full point to it, so the class really was worth 3.0 on a weighted scale. That means the student would have 18.5 grade points divided by five classes, and their weighted GPA would be a 3.7. This is how some students end up with GPAs that are actually higher than a 4.0.
But, a high school down the road may use a completely different weighting system. Maybe that high school chooses to add an additional .3 for Honors classes, and .6 for AP or IB classes. It would appear that overall, their students had lower GPAs than the other high school. This is why you can’t really compare weighted GPAs between high schools in different districts. The scales are not the same.
What is the Purpose of Weighting the GPAs?
There are various reasons. First, weighting the GPA may encourage students to take more rigorous classes. Students know that a “B” in that AP class will be worth as much as an “A” in a regular class. And for high schools that still use class rank, weighting the classes is a way to further differentiate among students, and reward them with a potentially higher ranking for taking a more rigorous course load.
GPA for College Admission
So, now that you understand the two types of GPAs used in high schools, you can understand why colleges can’t just accept a student’s weighted GPA. It’s not an even comparison between high schools. So, when searching for colleges and you see the GPA range of their accepted students, know that they are usually referring to the students’ unweighted GPA. (There are some exceptions to this rule. For example, public colleges in Florida list their accepted students’ average GPA range according to their colleges’ own scale. Read below for more on that!)
But What About Rigor?
This does NOT mean that colleges do not care about whether the students took a rigorous curriculum. They do. The colleges will strip down the applicants’ high school grades to the unweighted scale, and then add their OWN weighting system to their applicants’ transcripts when calculating their high school GPA. This way, they are comparing applicants in a more fair manner. So, this is one reason choosing to take challenging courses matters, and why colleges will advise students that they would rather see a B in a challenging class rather than seeing straight As in less challenging courses.
But that’s not all…
The Tricky Part
This is the part that most students don’t realize when scheduling their classes in high school. You know all of those electives they are taking in high school that maybe provide a nice boost to the high school unweighted GPA? Depending on the college, and depending on the elective, many of those electives will be filtered out of the applicant’s transcript entirely when the college recalculates the GPA. That fun Ceramics class, and even the PE class that the student’s high school required for graduation, may not be included as part of their GPA for college admission. So sometimes a student’s high school unweighted GPA is significantly higher than the GPA the college will be looking at.
See also: How do High School Graduation Requirements Differ From College Admissions Requirements?
Colleges will frequently look only at core academic classes – Math, Science, Social Studies, English, and Foreign Languages. Most will also include Technology courses and classes like Economics. And while they will likely include an AP Art or AP Music class in their calculation, they may not include more basic arts electives or classes unique to a given high school, like “Study Skills”. They may accept an elective like “Legal Studies” under Social Studies or maybe they will not. So, it’s possible, and probably likely, that the GPA your student sees on their report card at the end of each semester is completely different than the one the college is using when considering your student for admission.
Conclusion
Colleges are usually not forthcoming about this information. Some admissions officers will explain their policy for grades if directly asked. (Here’s an example from a FL public university.) Others will be fairly vague. And this does not mean that your student should load up their schedule with highly academic classes each semester in an effort to be sure all of their classes will get counted!
Balancing the schedule is very important for your student’s stress level and for success. You just need to be aware of this GPA recalculation at application time. If your student’s unweighted GPA is high because they got As in all of their electives, but then they didn’t do so well in their core academic classes, there is the potential for a surprise at admissions time. But, if your student has been balancing their schedule well with interesting electives and those more challenging academic classes, that’s unlikely to happen.
For more about how college admissions departments will consider your student’s high school GPA in the context of their high school, see What Do You Know About Your High School Profile?
